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Santa, Baby, Put A Nerf Bat Under The Tree, For Me

I know that I should want to do raiding “the hard way” and feel so accomplished when we actually kill the thing. I should.

However, there comes a point where you just don’t want to wipe anymore. I am to that point. I just want him dead and I don’t really care how we get there, so long as in the end, the boss is dead. Dead dead dead.

This weekend, we tried the infamous 1-tank method for Baleroc. It did not go well. Oh boy, did it not go well. The tank died within 2 minutes into the encounter, each time. With 2-tanks and 3-healers, at least we REACHED the enrage timer alive. This time, not so much.

Dear Baleroc. Go have a drink on me. Just leave your loot behind. I won't tell.

I’m not disappointed in these nerfs. Maybe I would be upset with the nerfs if we were on the cusp of winning. But right now, it seems like it would be a long uphill battle. I remember wiping for weeks and weeks on Arthas. Maybe 2 months. It was soul-killing. (I think, in the end, it was somewhere around 80 wipes before the kill, and the kill did come after the nerf.)

Comments

Santa, Baby, Put A Nerf Bat Under The Tree, For Me — 11 Comments

It’s interesting the difference in how two groups describe the changes.

To the blogosphere at large, it’s ‘nerfts’, implying that everything was fine before, but we’re making it easier.

When talking to someone at Blizz like GhostCrawler, though, it’s presented as an ‘adjustment’, implying that something was wrong and it needed fixing.

Based on what he was saying, and has said again over on TankSpot, these are needful fixes to normalize the boss fights. People that got through earlier were just really, really good. But we’ve seen that time and again.

Biggest surprise to me: that it was announced at all. They’re good at sneaking stuff in. I guess this is all part of the “we care, and we’re doing shit” PR game plan (unannounced, of course!).

I do like watching how Blizzard tries to balance the desires of the uberleet raider types, and the middle of the road raiders, and the casual “I just want to go pug sometimes and see things”. It’s a hard task and they do it better than we often give them credit.

Actually I’m kind of psyched that they’re nerfing heroics, too. I mean, we just got to Ragnaros, it’ll take us a while, but I’m hoping we get a month or two to try heroic modes before 4.3. I’d like to have enough heroic gear that none of us are tempted by the LFR tier of gear. Call me selfish but I really want to see the new fights with my raid, not some random pugs!

They’ve been pretty good about nerfing content and letting the players know. They’ve already nerfed Firelands once and they’re doing it again to open it up for others.

‘Nerf’ is used to describe making something easier or reducing its severity. It’s not really a fix. These fights don’t need to be ‘fixed’ they just need downward adjustments in some numbers.

For example, having more armor stacks drop off Ryolith when he steps on an active volcano wasn’t a fixing, it was an adjustment made to reduce the length of the ‘steering’ phase.

The encounters aren’t broken, they’re just really difficult.

I might suggest that Ragnaros is a little overtuned with the first transition being too requiring in 10 mans. Trying to prevent 8 elementals at varying distances from getting to Rag’s hammer is difficult when you can’t CC or snare them short of doing damage to them.

Consider the raid composition… it means everyone except healers (if you’re two healing) has to jump one. It sort of sucks when three healing hehe.

In Blizzard’s thinking ‘difficult’ often is ‘broken’. They work hard to balance fights and make their difficulty tuned just to where they want it. They have plans for how hard something is suppose to be but they are never sure if they got it right until enough people have tried it. Once they have those statistics they often say, “Drat. We planned for X number of people to be able to do this fight and only 80% of X are getting it down. That means we need to ‘nerf’ it 20%”. Look, making a fight that is impossible is easy. Making a fight that is ridiculously hard but still winnable is harder. Making a fight that is EXACTLY as hard as you wanted it to be, no more and no less… that is hard. Really hard. It almost certainly takes several tweaks after the fact

I admit I was a little pissed about the changes but a couple of friends pointed out to me…if you still do not know the encounter or handle the mechanics…you are going to wipe still. Much like the changes to T11 if you didnt follow the rules of Cho and Nef…they are still going to eat you alive.